Bundled Quick Reviews

Infested Planet was surprisingly enjoyable. It is a short RTS, kind of like the StarCraft Terran campaign minus the economy. Your human exploration of an alien world goes awry when you come upon an endless stream of angry, hungry bugs, guided by an adaptive overmind that wants to incorporate your human DNA. You stomp huge streams of bugs, blow up their hives, and defend your bases. There is nothing especially special here, just a straightforward game of sending your squads out to fight. You get to customize and level them in each map. The game is not very difficult at normal difficulty, and you can 100% it in about 10 hours. It is a little repetitive within that, in that the basic gameplay does not change much over the course of the game. You get access to new upgrades, and so do the aliens. The basic unit of gameplay is fun for as long as it needs to be.

Caravan is pretty bad, as far as I played. Steam reviews suggest that the first several hours are slow, repetitive, and boring, after which it becomes slow, repetitive, and interesting. This trading game is marred by long transition animations after every action, whether those are 10-second walking animations at the start and end of every journey and random encounter or a shorter dice animation six times every round of every trade or fight. Add to that random events that have a larger impact than your decisions (someone joins your party! your donkey dies! someone ambushes you and stabs you to death, so you get to redo all those transition animations since the last checkpoint!). I gave it more time and benefit of the doubt than it deserved.